Some four decades ago, the Monty Python crew did a classic sketch called “The Summarize Proust Competition.” (NB: The link, at its very end, is mildly NSFW.) Unfortunately, none of the contestants in that competition did very well, so the prize ended up being awarded in a rather memorably arbitrary fashion.

Well, here we are, all the way down the cavern of the years — out of the dark backward and abysm, as the chap says — and we finally have an entrant who can legitimately claim the trophy. This limerick is by NR’s own Rick Brookhiser:

For a long time I went to bed early.

The baron was noble and surly.

Odette was a whore,

Society a bore

And time passed. But memory is pearly.

I think Proust — sorry, I meant to say PrOWst — would have been delighted.